School board talks goals for coming year

STERLING — During a workshop on Thursday evening, the RE-1 Valley Board of Education discussed a number of topics from graduation requirements to their goals for this year.No action was taken on any of the items discussed.The first topic of discussion was the open forum portion of regular meetings. This is a time where citizens can address the board. Part of the discussion on this focused on changing some of the wording in the statement on the agendas regarding open forum.There was also discussion about possibly moving the open forum time to after role is taken, instead of after the consent agenda and meeting agenda have been approved. Superintendent Betty Summers will talk with legal counsel to see if the open forum can go first, or if the agendas have to be approved first.Another topic of discussion was graduation requirements, specifically math requirements. The board talked about whether or not students who take the Core 1 high school math class in eighth grade should get credit; they don’t right now. Right now three units of math are needed to graduate high school. So if a student takes Core 1 math in eighth grade and a math class freshman and sophomore year, they could potentially not take any math classes in junior or senior years, making them rusty in math when they get to college.Ron Marostica, assistant superintendent of RE-1, also talked about how they’re trying to allow secondary students to have as many elective choices in math as possible.

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There also was some discussion about how much time is left in a student’s schedule for them to take the electives they want like band or choir. Sometimes they might not be able to take all the electives that they want to.There was also discussion about the depth of knowledge areas, recall, skills and concepts, strategic thinking and extended thinking that have to be applied to all content areas, including math.Marostica also briefly talked about the Freshman Foundations class at Sterling High School. The class is designed to help students adjust to high school and get them started on the path to deciding what they want to do in the future by introducing them to the College in Colorado Website.He talked about how much students are benefiting from that class.“The Freshman Foundation class is remarkably successful,” Marostica said.Another topic of discussion was goal setting. The board looked at a School District Goals and Objectives policy that is put in the budget packet every year, and is part of the district policy manual that can be found on the district Web site. The document was created in 1971 and the last time it was revised was in 1985.In the document, the goals and objectives that are listed are more along the lines of philosophy. The board will take a look at the document in the future to see if they still want to use it or if the district mission and vision can take the place of that.They also discussed board goals for this year. Their goals for 2009-2010 were related to four areas: student achievement, highly effective governance, school environment and school finance. They discussed changing the wording of some of the goals and eliminating some parts of the goals. They also discussed how to incorporate communication with the community into the highly-effective governance goal. The board talked about hanging something on the wall showing what they’ve accomplished in the district and writing monthly news articles to improve communication with the public.Also, as part of the student achievement goal the board discussed whether or not they should follow up with students after they graduate to see how the school district did in preparing them. They talked about how many students would need to be contacted to get an accurate picture of how the district is doing, if it should be a small group or the whole class.There was some concern about doing this follow-up due to the costs. If they copy and mail letters out to the whole graduating class, that could get costly.The board also looked at the facility/equipment/maintenance cycle. Bleachers at Caliche were scheduled to be replaced in 2009-2010 with expenses coming out of the capital reserve fund, but that didn’t happen because of budget issues.That will have to be looked at this year, along with other projects in the cycle this year, including addressing drainage problems at Ayres Elementary. Summers said they’ve tried some things at Hagen this summer to address drainage issues and they’ll have to see how that works.The final topic that was briefly addressed at the workshop was bussing/transportation costs. An issue with transportation has been the way vocational programs are charged one fee for transportation and everyone else is charged a different fee. The board talked about and asked Summers to look at possibly giving each building a transportation budget, instead of having the different fees.The board will have further discussions about bussing and transportation costs at a future meeting.

RE-1 Valley School District has announced its policy for determining eligibility of children who may receive free and reduced price meals served under the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Program.
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